Starlight
Lanes is the very first location shown in the second season of "Dexter".

It
pops up first in Episode
1 (of Season 2), "It's Alive", when we see Dexter and his
co-workers bowling.

Dexter
is being followed by a suspicious Doakes (who is watching him from the
bar), and Dexter is determined to seem as mundane as possible, in hopes
of boring Doakes into submission. So he takes up bowling. (Dexter is surprised
to discover that he's good at it.)

The
same bowling alley shows up again later in the same episode. We see
Dexter in his car as he pulls into the parking lot of Starlight Lanes.
He walks up to Doakes (who is watching him from his own car), and greets
him in a mock-friendly manner. It works, and Doakes (faced with another
night of watching boring bowling) soon gives up in disgust and leaves,
freeing Dexter to pursue his darker interests.

The
bowling alley turns up again in Episode 8 (of Season 2), "Morning Comes", where we first see Dexter's group bowling inside, joined by
crazy Lila.

The
action later moves out into the alley's dark parking lot, where Dexter
is attacked by a knife-wielding assailant (Jimenez, the guy who killed
Dexter's mother). Dexter survives with a minor cut, but for Lila (who had
put the man up to the attack), it serves its purpose, allowing her to get
closer to Dexter.

Q.
What is it actually in real life?

A. An actual
bowling alley, but not in Miami.

Q.
Where can I find it in real life?

A. In the first
season, when they first showed a "bowling
alley" (in the scene where Dexter dumps his father's ashes), they
settled for a fake exterior (using the outside of a Long Beach hotel).
disguised by darkness and a fake sign.

But in the second
season, since they spent a lot of time at the location, they opted for
a real bowling alley.

Instead of Long Beach,
they traveled all the way to Santa Monica, and shot the scenes at the AMF
Bay Shore Lanes, at 234 Pico Blvd,
in Santa Monica, CA.

That's less than a half mile
east/southeast of the Santa Monica Pier, at the corner of Pico & 3rd
Street (half a mile southeast of the Third Street
Promenade). The parking lot (where Dexter encounters Doakes,
and where he is later attacked by Jimenez) is on the northeast side of
the bowling alley. The big red & white "Bowl" sign is
out by Pico, on the northwest edge of that same lot.

A. The main
clue here was the big, vertical, red & white sign outside that
reads "BOWL". At first, I thought it might be the Palos
Verdes Bowl, on Crenshaw in Torrance, in San Pedro, which has a very similar
vertical sign that also reads "BOWL". But when I checked it,
it wasn't the same kind of lettering. So I went to Google Maps, got a map
of the L.A. coast, and typed in "bowling alley". It popped up
quite a few, but since I started north and planned to work my way down
south along the coast, Santa Monica's Bay Shore Lanes was one of the
first I encountered. Google StreetView gave me a perfect confirmation shot
of the alley's exterior and its familiar sign.

However, there
was still the question of whether or not they shot the interiors there
as well. So I Googled for images of "Bay Shore Lanes and Santa
Monica", and up popped this
photo, which perfectly matches the interior seen on the show.

And finally,
I went there in person to double-check, and to shoot the photo above..